SteamOS vs. Windows 8.1 NVIDIA Performance

For those NVIDIA gaming customers running Microsoft Windows 8.1 that have been thinking about giving Valve's SteamOS Linux-based gaming platform a try, here are some early benchmarks of the SteamOS 1.0 beta that compare the performance to Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro x64 on multiple NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Since Friday night I have been extremely busy trying out the public version of the SteamOS Beta, being incredibly excited since first hearing about it from Gabe in early 2012. Phoronix readers have learned about the SteamOS graphics compositor, low-level details of Valve's OS, and who's developing this operating system plus other extra information about the innards of SteamOS.

This past weekend I also showed it's possible to run the SteamOS kernel on Ubuntu, the Steam Controller works on Linux, AMD Radeon GPUs with Catalyst will work on SteamOS, and with some changes Intel's open-source graphics can work with SteamOS.

The most major, comprehensive articles published on Phoronix this weekend were a 7-way NVIDIA GeForce GPU comparison on SteamOS and Intel benchmarks comparing SteamOS to Ubuntu 13.10. With this latest article are benchmarks of the same tests/games and with the same settings being benchmarked on SteamOS 1.0 "Alchemist" Beta versus Windows 8.1 Pro x64.

With this article the performance of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650, GeForce GTX 760, and GeForce GTX 780 Ti were compared on an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" system under both Windows 8.1 Pro and SteamOS 1.0 as of this weekend. While in the original NVIDIA benchmarks of SteamOS were seven graphics cards, this Windows vs. SteamOS comparison had to be limited due to time constraints with already working on these articles and tests for 18 hour days since Friday and then having to catch a planned flight to work on Phoronix-Russia and Phoronix Test Suite 5.0, for which there's already a few more dozen Phoronix Linux articles and I've been putting the finishing touches on them this past weekend as well.

All hardware was maintained the same and with the same settings for testing under both operating systems. All of the game/benchmark test settings were also maintained the same under both operating systems as controlled by the Phoronix Test Suite for automated and reproducible testing.

So on the following pages are the initial results of the standardized tests between SteamOS 1.0 Beta and Windows 8.1 Pro x64 (with all available updates as of this weekend and the NVIDIA 331.93 driver) for the assortment of tested NVIDIA hardware. If you appreciate all of these Linux articles and tests that are mostly done single-handedly by myself, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or a PayPal tip this holiday season. Thanks!